Farnaz Fassihi

make sure that their families are safe and they survive, and they're scrambling to find food and gasoline and shelter.

We haven't really seen yet a massive domestic uprising, but it's only day two, and we don't know what's possible.

Yeah, they took out Mr. Khamenei on day one, and they're still continuing to strike.

I think it's going to take some time to figure out what's going to happen in Iran and whether or not this regime will survive.

For the Iranian people inside Iran to be able to mobilize in a way that they would lay a central role in toppling the regime, there has to be strategy and planning and some sort of unity from opposition leaders inside the country and outside the country, and also a sense that the regime and its oppressive tools

and its means of crackdown and killing have been significantly weakened or disassembled.

Otherwise, if people just come to the streets again, as they did in January, and they're unarmed, they risk lethal crackdowns and deaths and killings again.

We do.

I think the difference in this current war in comparison with the June war with Israel is that the targets have expanded to not just military missiles and nuclear sites, to structures and buildings and institutions that the government used to oppress and repress.

Like what?

Like the revolution court.

today was attacked.

And this is a court that's highly notorious that tried and prosecuted political cases and dissidents.

They attacked the state broadcasting, which is a tool of propaganda.

And they also went after two military bases belonging to the Revolutionary Guards and their underlings, Basij, the volunteer plainclothes militia that we see shooting and killing and beating protesters.

And they decimated those two bases.

So there is some evidence, at least, that the target is widening.

And it certainly seems that the goal of the United States and Israel is to facilitate regime change on the ground.

It's interesting you bring up Venezuela because Iranian sources were telling me that one of the conversations they're having in private about succession and about planning amongst themselves is the question of who will be the Delsey of Iran, referring to Venezuela's vice president, Erdogan.

And some of the names that have come up are technocrats and former generals of the Revolutionary Guards who are sort of seen as centrists, pragmatists, people who maybe would be open to a change of course.